The world is changing so fast that when I meditate on how different it is today from even 5 years ago, certainly 20 years ago, it boggles the mind.

One of the biggest changes that I love is people breaking free of old, outdated ideas of work and “making a living.” And, one of the biggest lies told to this day to keep the old paradigm alive is that we must train for the first chunk of our lives to get jobs and do work so we can have the things we want and go places on weekends before we go back and work another week for someone else. Under this paradigm, we give most of our time to working for others’ goals and wealth, and our lives get the leftovers.

Except, for many, many people, this is no longer true. The internet destroyed this mythical rule that we do school, train, get jobs, make other people wealthy, and eek out our own exiestence happy with an occasional vacation and a decent sized TV.

I’ve been here since the beggining of the digital revolution creating businesses, courses and books, coaching people to start, grow and prosper with their own businesses. I’ve helped rescue thousands of people from “The Matrix” over the last 19 years. I’ve guided them to cut their own trail in life. I’ve shown myself and others the way to freedom from jobs and into a world of serving others and the Planet on their own terms.

Yes, work still exists in this scenario, but the energy that powers this work isn’t a 9-5 paycheck, fear of loss, and uncertainty. The energy behind it is passion for doing something you love. What others might see as work, you experience as something you can’t wait to do every day.

Getting money for what we do in our own businesses is a side effect of doing what we’d be doing even if we didn’t make money at it.

Money and making a great living with our own businesses isn’t the main driving factor – it just comes with the territory of the new world we created for ourselves.

I’ve seen all the rules that were introduced to all of us from birth. I’ve seen the life path they wanted us to take. And early in life I rejected everything about the “normal life” they wanted for us simply because they didn’t know anything else was possible.

If you are bummed out about following the path you’re on now and know you need a change, at least you have plenty of examples of how regular people have made it with their own businesses, and you can too.

It’s not easy, but it will be YOURS and you will be in 100% control of your life and your future. Starting and growing your own business is a real, legitimate option these days and not nearly the “gamble” the naysayers are always quick to remind us about.

If you’ve started your own business, you’ve already made the choice to thrive on your own terms. If you are at a plateau in your business looking for the next big growth spurt, PM me and I’d be happy to show you how to get to the next level of growth (and far beyond that!)

Whichever camp you fall into, keep seeking freedom and live life by your own rules. What they told us we must do to live decent lives were merely suggestions.

Freedom begins with realizing you have choices, not mandates, regarding how you live your life, how you serve, and how you make money doing what you really love.

Schrödinger’s cat is a thought experiment, sometimes described as a paradox, devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. You probably know the scenario that says a cat that may be simultaneously both alive and dead in the box.

In the past few years, for marketers, content marketing has become both alive and dead. Alive, in that the world on the whole is producing more content than anytime in history. And dead, in that we marketers are dropping the ball BIG time when it comes to regularly producing quality content to attract new customers, clients, and for lead generation.

For many of us, content marketing is effectively dead.

There are two reasons why content marketing could be dead for you:

1. You simply aren’t finding enough time to brainstorm and create quality content. (Like most people)

2. There is already so freakin’ much content in every niche on every topic, it seems wasteful to try to create yet something else in your topic range. (So, again, you don’t.)

Here’s the paradox though: Never has there been more content created than right now in history.

It’s not that new interesting content isn’t being created in every known niche. It’s that YOU aren’t as prolific a creator as other people who really get a kick out of writing and making videos or podcasts.

So what are we to do when we simply cannot or will not bring ourselves to the daily grind of content marketing?

Give up on all that potential traffic?

Heck no!

We use “content leverage.”

In our book “The Leverage Black Book,” Gina and I talk about how to use other peoples’ content in the same way we’d use content we created ourselves.

And one of the absolutely coolest things I’ve discovered since I’ve slowed way down on producing my own blog content on a regular basis is generating leads by piggy-backing on other content that’s better than anything I could ever produce in the first place.

There are a few ways to do it, but none is better, in my opinion, than Leadgrab.io.

Watch the other videos on their page to see how you can put your call to action on articles on CNN and thousands of other top-tier content outlets around the web.

This will get you out of worrying about (or feeling guilty about) not doing the content marketing you were taught to do. And it is very effective at generating leads or sales while getting you out of worrying about producing tons of content!

In fact, it’s even better, because the content you use to get attention in this way is usually far better than anything you or I would take the time to produce in the first place!

Chuck Bartok resurrecting his famous talk show podcast for his business audience. I get the honor of kicking it off again with him as his guest on last week’s show focused on SEO, user engagement, and examples from a project we’re both working on.

I started this whole thing as a response to something someone posted on Facebook in reaction to the recent shootings. As I typed, I became aware I had much more to say about this than should go into a Facebook comment.

Note: There is no negativity and no traditional call to arms in this post. If you’re looking to feed your fear monster through my words, you’ll find little satisfaction here.

The “news” about what appears to be happening to everyone (because it is all that we see on the web and TV) is never representative of the whole picture. America is never one thing. Generalizing how an entire country is doing at any given moment is a gross oversimplification that hurts us badly for several reasons.

Because our worldview colors our daily choices and actually turns us TOWARD what we fear and makes what we fear bigger, not smaller.

Magnitudes more good things happened yesterday than bad things. Just because the news does not reflect that fact does not erase it.

What we focus on we get more of. That’s true simply because we all test it and get the results of it every day. No one is immune to this Universal Law and there are no exceptions. Anyone can check to see if this is true just by thinking about it for a few moments and noticing how it absolutely shows up in their daily lives. The proof is inside you. No need to read a study or listen to anyone else. See for yourself.

It is not fair to ourselves to only focus on the bad in isolation of the good. We are perfectly balanced beings when we arrive in this world. The world then begins the work of unbalancing us right at the welcome mat. If we allow outside factors to dictate how we should feel and act, we’re in big trouble. It is feasible that we could arrive at a point in our adult lives where we are so out of balance that we truly believe it is possible to have an existence filled with nothing but bitterness, regret, hate, and the one thing that controls it all: FEAR.

“Fear is capable of erasing thousands of years of progress as a species, instantly turning us back into shit-tossing monkeys.”

Run to the hills. Burn the bridges. Our lizard brains take over and we find ourselves believing completely absurd ideas about the general sickness our whole society is feeling. When bad things happen, our lower, unevolved selves want to run back to the caves and get our spears and protect ourselves from imagined potential harm.

While it’s fair to call this urge natural, it doesn’t mean that is the way we should be living. Mainly because that way of thinking leaves out something very important. When you wake up (miracle) and find the Earth is still turning (miracle) and you can go out into the world and have just one person smile at you, then the world is in better shape than it is in bad shape.

The world, simply due to life’s continued existence, is always better than bad. Because if we’re still here, we still have a choice about the quality of our existence. Now, that in itself can mean that the world could still seem like a pretty bleak place. People could all be killing each other, but we’d still be alive and able to choose to stop.

But it’s never, ever that bad. People aren’t all killing each other. Most people are peaceful. Most people hold love, not hate, in their hearts. This is evidenced by the fact that all people are not trying to kill each other all the time. If you turn on the news and they are reporting about a shooting and riots and then the news announcers themselves turn on each other and everywhere you look someone is sneaking up on someone else to do them harm, that’s one thing. Except that’s never happened. That’s an idea. A string of words whose meaning has never been reflected in actual world events. Like, ever.

What we mistakenly accept as the truth of things is always based on a minority of people’s actions and beliefs. No large group of people could possibly hold and maintain the urge to self-destruct long enough to make it fully happen. World War 1 would still be raging if that were the case. It is impossible for large groups to stick to the mission of self destruction. While it’s true that individuals can certainly hold onto hate long enough to do great damage, big groups of humans cannot. Goodness cannot sustain a long-term attack against its nature. You can be filled with anger and hate for a little while, but it is unsustainable. Rest, peace, and love always come back to you. It is a universal, biological imperative.

Some people are always going to go off script.

Like I’m doing now. In the face of what’s happening in the news, what I’m doing now is treason against other peoples desire to be outraged and feel bad. People want to feel bad, angry, and hateful and I’m saying no, we shouldn’t. That just pisses them off even more, mainly because they know it’s true. Neither your mama, your preacher, nor your guru would approve.

The absurdity here is that this is obviously right, yet it doesn’t matter to people currently hell bent on viewing the world as going to shit and that only more bad stuff is going to happen. That nothing good is happening. That nothing can steer us from this course we think we’re on. And they’ll beat that drum till there’s a hole in it and it catches fire.

The course you think the world is on is often just someone else’s idea you are buying into right now. But you can’t lump the world into that fantasy because it’s never true. At any given moment, life is always beautiful. Miraculous and singular. And love is the glue that holds our existence together in the first place. At any given moment there are bad actors (tiny percentage of the population) and the rest of us who are moving in other directions from the bad actors.

We could heal wounds a lot faster after bad things happen if we’d just work to maintain perspective. Instead we wallow for a long time in things we cannot do anything about. They are done, today is a new day, yet we bring the old shit into our new days like it is real. Except the thing we’re worked up about is no longer happening. We’re now infatuated with a memory of something and we still want to pick a fight with it, over and over in our minds, like we’re going to “win” this time around.

We can not only heal wounds, but prevent a lot more wounding in our future with a new view of how things ought to, and really do, work.

The real enemy is fear.

Fear makes mountains out of mole hills. It takes a bad situation and magnifies it out of all proportion to the original issue. This leads to broad generalizations and actions that in no way match the initial hurt. I mean, social media is just dripping with ridiculous right now.

For example, when people get killed by a couple of bad actors, the entire country SEEMS to react with the same fear-based assertions and “solutions.” Except that’s not true. Most people are not voicing their opinions on the matter at all. It is only EVER just a handful of people and organizations who always speak up, report news, and even manufacture news who control the conversation that’s being had.

Just because a conversation is being had, and it appears everyone is having it, of course doesn’t mean it is true, meaningful, or productive. It’s just a conversation some people want to have. And it seems only more powerful if we delude ourselves into thinking it is THE conversation and THE thing that’s on everyone’s mind. And it never, ever is.

My post, right here, is an example of depriving the fear-based conversation going on on social media of the fuel it needs to grow.

We’ll never eradicate violent behavior if we answer it with violent behavior. Even then, we’ll probably never completely eradicate violent behavior, but a severe reduction of it would be nice. We’ll never eradicate hatred and fear by doubling down with more fear and hatred. Anyone who argues against this is always being guided completely by fear in the moment. Of course it makes no sense to argue about this obvious fact. But someone in pain and fear will argue until they lose consciousness that retaliation with equal or greater measure of fear-based action is the only obvious choice. And that anyone against it is weak, stupid, asleep, or otherwise incapable of seeing their “truth.”

Conversations can be started by anyone. Topics can be chosen by anyone. If you don’t like the conversation others want you to have with them, start your own, like I’m doing right now. What we focus on and how much we allow fear to rule our existence is totally on us. If you don’t like what’s happening, you aren’t allowed to just react to it all the time. If you want to stay sane and balanced, you must re-balance yourself with perspective and manage your fear by going back to your initial factory setting of Love. Then spread it. Start your own damned conversation and tell the story of life that YOU want to tell. Tell your own truth.

You don’t have to figure everything out for everyone else.

You don’t have to write a manifesto on the importance of choosing one side over another. We each do our part in balancing or unbalancing the good/bad ratio in our society simply by the thoughts and actions we choose. If everyone were to think, all at once, that the world was going to shit, guess what? That’s exactly what seems to happen. What people don’t know is which came first; the events or the thoughts.

Imagine then what would happen if everyone had the exact opposite thought. That the world is a breeding ground for love, fairness, and joy. It’s all just in the words and thoughts we choose to have. People seem to be waiting for the evidence that the world can be a better place before they let themselves believe it can. They want the world to improve first and THEN they’ll believe it’s possible. Well, it just doesn’t work that way. As Wayne Dyer said “You’ll see it when you believe it.”

When news channels make it their prime mission to play on our fear, then more and more people get roped into believing the lie that there is nothing but fear and danger in the world. It’s not true, but lots of people are believing it is right now. And so events transpire to prove their point.

“See! Another shooting! Told you the world was going to shit!”

Even if events happen that would seem to prove the assertion that we’re past a point of no return, there will always be a sizeable chunk of people who will disagree. It’s not something beyond our control. It’s a CHOICE. If too many people choose fear, it wins. Could life feel better to us if things were more balanced right now? Yes. But things already are more balanced than the news or your fearful friends would lead you to believe.

19 billion good things happened yesterday. Starting with the fact that every sentient being who was still alive woke up to be alive for another day. Even the people who died and all the other bad things that happened the same day have to be weighed against the good. It’s a lie to focus on just one part of the story and say the world is just bad and only getting worse. The absurdity of it all is that we do this to ourselves and we can just as easily stop doing it with the flip of a thought.

No need for a 126-point plan. No need for long-term, agonizing solutions. No need for more or less laws and drawn-out battles in state houses or on battlefields.

It truly, simply is about the way we think and how we manage fear.

To start a revolution, go outside and shake hands with a cop. Hug a person who is different from you. Hold love as the overriding and paramount guide to your entire life. It might not seem like anything in the face of the monsters we’ve created, but it actually is the most powerful and the only real solution to what vexes society today. It is the only thing that ever has or ever will work against hate and fear.

With all this, here’s a point to ponder:

During bad times you’ll inevitably hear people say things like “Here we go again.” “When are we ever going to fix this?” History has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, with countless tests, that the way we’ve tried to deal with problems in the world such as violence, war, aggression and the like haven’t worked. It is very safe to say that every solution we’ve come up with so far that hasn’t worked is, then, never going to work. Applying the same faulty solutions to the problem the next time it comes up will yield the exact same result as before.

In other words the same problem has popped up again, and people are saying the same things need to be done about it as the last time. It’s obvious what we’ve tried so far has not and will not work.

So what is the harm in trying something completely different this time? The only other options are giving up or doing what we’ve always done. I am positive that a new approach to our problems can come out of the fertile ground of the ideas above. Espousing no political or cultural affiliations whatsoever, it is a pure, human way of thinking about life and the world around us and only good can come of it. I’m not advocating for new institutions, laws, or propping up any old dogma. It is utterly agnostic other than the fact that it adheres only to what it is to be human. I’m only advocating for us to become more so. Who could have an issue with that?

Calm, peaceful people are like white blood cells around panicky, scared people. It does make a difference when we rub elbows (but don’t get down in the mud with) people are are acting out of fear. Everyone seeks out leaders, voices of reason, for calm in a tense situation. No act of Congress needs to be initiated for you to become one of those leaders starting right now. Just change your mind. Follow your heart. And breathe. It will have an effect and it will spread.

All my life I’ve marveled at the amazing things people can do. Musicians, athletes, people with all kinds of wondrous, fantastic talents that beguile us and make us wonder what kind of greatness we might have in ourselves by comparison.

I’ve studied this quite a bit in my (almost) 48 years and I’ve arrived at a conclusion from personal and empirical sources.

Talent, the kind that leaves your jaw slack and your brain mushy trying to figure out what you are seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, touching, is something a person reaches into another realm to bring back to show us in ours. Truly inspired and inexplicably talented people are travelers and bridges to distant realms, I’m convinced.

We never understand completely where it all comes from. A masterful performance. An unparalleled story. Ask anyone who feels like being honest and they will tell you the same kind of story about “where it comes from.”

Practice, passion, obsession, yes, they all have something to do with it. But there is something else that isn’t quite possible about what they do. Something “other” that brings magic into it in a big way. A way that makes our jaws and brains not work exactly right. The way a dog tilts his head listening to a sound no one else can hear.

There are millions of examples. Here is just one. I call it proof of concept. There is plainly more afoot here than just a practiced plucking of strings and roaring, passionate musical expression…